For most East Coast mountain bikers, being added to the highly selective— and very short list of riders to complete all 68 super-rocky miles of the Massanutten Trail in a single day would be considered a lifetime achievement. For Sue Haywood, the “The Ring” challenge as it’s known, was little more than a fun day in the saddle.

During her decade as a professional racer, Haywood racked up a lengthy palmarès: U.S. Short Track and Super-D National Champion; 24-Hour Solo World Champion; Pan-American Mountain Bike Champion; multiple World Cup podiums; and winner of numerous other 100-mile and 24-hour races. In 2018, she earned a Master’s Enduro National Championship title.

Haywood reached “mountain bike legend” status long ago, but she’s far from finished in her quest to leave an indelible mark as one of the most impactful American riders in the sport’s history. These days, she’s turning her attention, talent, and energy toward building and growing the mountain bike scene in her adopted state of West Virginia, primarily through safeguarding trails to ride and helping to entice new riders into the sport.

“Like all of us, there’s an evolution to our biking world, our biking lifestyle,” Haywood says. “I would say I’m [now] in the hardcore volunteer stage.”

Haywood’s longtime home of Davis is the unofficial capital of the eastern mountain playground that is the Potomac Highlands region, which boasts world-class mountain biking and kayaking along with hiking, skiing, and a plethora of other outdoor pursuits. She moved there in 1994 after college at West Virginia University and jumped right into the active lifestyle, quickly rising through the ranks in mountain biking, but also spending a good bit of time snowboarding and cross-country skiing. During her pro career, Haywood kept her home base in Davis despite it not being ideal for a World Cup-level athlete’s lifestyle. Her dedication to the state was rewarded with an unusual sponsorship from the West Virginia Division of Tourism.

Her relationship with the community has only continued to grow. Haywood has served as president of the Blackwater Bicycle Association (BBA), a local International Mountain Bicycling Association chapter, for the past six years. Her role encompasses a broad range of responsibilities that include coordinating with other nonprofits and agencies (sometimes tricky given the number of endangered species in this ecologically rich area), attending local government meetings, grant writing, and long-term strategic planning—all while taking care of the region’s jungle-like trails.

“We’re trying to figure all that out while also not taking on too much,” Haywood says. “Some of it’s just keeping morale up—we have these trailwork days, you go up to Plantation Trail and you’re ready to lob rhododendrons for eight hours. It’s a lot of maintenance of those legacy trails and our philosophy is we don’t want to lose one single bit. As long as you have company, I think that really helps. You just try to keep it fun. It’s great exercise as well, and it really keeps you in touch with the trails.”

It’s not all sunshine and mountain wildflowers. Haywood says there are plenty of moments of frustration when it comes to keeping dialogues open with land managers.

“We have a big network of social trails that are the elephant in the room,” Haywood says. “It’s not like they’re a secret, but it just is very telling that we’re super hungry for more trails, better trails, better-maintained trails, because for a town of 600 people, we have a big ridership and then we just have so many visitors that come as well.”

The BBA puts on two long-standing and beloved events that bring many of those visitors: the Revenge of the Rattlesnake cross-country race and the Canaan Mountain Bike Festival. The festival, in particular, epitomizes the down-home, grassroots nature of the BBA, the community, and Haywood herself.

“Last year, I think we had maybe like 400 people. It’s not huge. And we’ve set it up to be as simple as it can be,” Haywood says. “There’s not a lot of infrastructure because we have such a great town. We do [“Run What Ya Brung”] trials and group rides and trailwork. We have a fundraiser party and a scavenger hunt. It’s just a really fun, nice time.”

The posters for this three-day bike party are psychedelic works of art. Haywood is in charge of it all, though she is quick to credit others in the club and says her challenge for future editions is to delegate more.

“It’s about people hanging out with each other, and I think if there’s anything you learn as you get older, it’s how precious your time with your peeps is,” she says. “You gotta take care of your people and look forward to meeting other people, too.”

Throughout her pro career, Haywood always took time to support other riders, a trait that led to her becoming a mountain bike skills coach and a key part of the West Virginia Interscholastic Cycling League (WVICL), the state’s National Interscholastic Cycling Association’s (NICA) high school mountain biking organization. Cassie Smith, another veteran of the local racing scene, founded the WVICL in 2017 and Haywood was one of the first people she grabbed to be involved.

“We’ve been friends since the early ‘90s and we’ve actually competed against each other for many, many years,” Smith says. “She’s always been someone that I look up to. She’s just such a kind, generous, and compassionate person. For what she has accomplished, she’s very humble. She’s always so encouraging and just a pillar of the community. So whenever I got a team together to do West Virginia NICA, of course, I was like, Sue’s got to be on the coaching staff .”

Haywood contributes a lot. Besides coaching a local team, she is a trainer for other coaches and works with the Girls Riding Together (GRiT) program. She also credits the WVICL for a big boost in good trails built in the state.

“Since NICA started, many of the state or county parks in West Virginia have somehow found the money or the approvals to build trail. Here in Canaan Valley, we have a five-and-a-half-mile flow trail [built specifically for NICA races], the first easy trail in this area, and now it’s the most popular trail,” Haywood says. “Other places in the state have built new trail that’s appropriate for NICA races. And it created a dialogue with mountain bikers more because, it’s kind of cliché, but when you say it’s for the kids, the ears open and the pocketbooks open more, which is how it should be, really.”

In her neck of the woods, Haywood is known as much for winter sports as for mountain biking. Soon after arriving in the area, she started working at the White Grass Ski Touring Center during the winters. Chip Chase, the center’s operator, was impressed right away.

“She’s a body genius, so she learned [cross-country skiing] super fast,” Chase says. “We have these clinics every year where people come down from New England and do high-end training for a lot of the better skiers at White Grass, and Susie can pick up everything instantly. You can just say something to her and just with words bouncing off her eardrums, she can do it—no practice, no nothing. She’s just, she’s amazingly intuitive with her physical self.”

Incidentally, Haywood was the first person to ski all 50 kilometers of marked trails at White Grass in a single day. Cross-country skiing has a lot in common with mountain biking, according to Chase, and it’s especially apparent in Haywood’s style with both sports, physically and spiritually.